Biographies

Teddington H. Moy

Madeline Moy turned 50 on September 10. She and her husband, Teddington “Ted” Hamm Moy, 48, celebrated with a low-key dinner of steak and cheese fries at Outback Steakhouse with their son, Daniel, 14. The next morning she kissed her husband goodbye, handed him his sack lunch and sent him off to work at the Pentagon as a program manager in information management support for the Army.

A short time later, a package arrived in the mail: her birthday gift from her husband, a Lands’ End sweater twin set, red.

Madeline Moy had planned to wait all day for Ted to come home so she could open it. She went to work at Charles R. Drew Elementary School in Silver Spring, where she is an instructional assistant. She got a call from her daughter, Jessica, a student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. The Pentagon is on fire, Jessica said.

“It was devastating, not knowing where he was,” Moy said.

Madeline Moy said she has accepted the worst, now that her husband of 21 years perished at the Pentagon.

Ted Moy was born and raised in the District’s Chinatown. His parents ran Veteran’s Food Market at Fifth and H Streets, NW. He helped in the store while growing up.

In 1975, while on a student trip to Taiwan, he met a girl from San Francisco, Madeline, and was smitten. She was a lot like him; she had strict, traditional Chinese parents, too, and was born and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Their families came from the same village in China – Toi Shan in Canton province.

They married July 12, 1980. Her mother picked the date, a lucky day on the Chinese calendar.

Ted Moy, a printer, began working for the Navy in 1983. He worked there until 1999 when cuts in defense spending shuttered his section and forced him to look for a new job. Then he went to work for the Army at the Pentagon.

“He was so patriotic,” his wife said, digging out a photograph of her husband decked out from head to toe in a red, white and blue sweat suit, complete with a floppy stars-and-stripes hat that he wore on the Fourth of July.

Madeline last spoke to Ted about 8 o’clock that last morning. He called to remind her about their son’s orthodontist appointment. “That was the last I heard from him,” Moy said.